{"id":242448,"date":"2026-08-09T13:04:40","date_gmt":"2026-08-09T18:04:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/oldest-known-giant-rock-scallop-bead-suggests-california-coastal-trade-began-millennia-earlier"},"modified":"2026-08-09T13:04:40","modified_gmt":"2026-08-09T18:04:40","slug":"oldest-known-giant-rock-scallop-bead-suggests-california-coastal-trade-began-millennia-earlier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/oldest-known-giant-rock-scallop-bead-suggests-california-coastal-trade-began-millennia-earlier","title":{"rendered":"Oldest known giant rock scallop bead suggests California coastal trade began millennia earlier"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/oldest-known-giant-rock-scallop-bead-suggests-california-coastal-trade-began-millennia-earlier2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Archaeologists have discovered two giant rock scallop beads that push back the clock on the first appearance of these high-status ornaments. The discovery shows that these prized marine beads were traded hundreds of miles from the California coast thousands of years earlier than previously thought.<\/p>\n<p>Radiocarbon dating places one of the beads at roughly 8,500 years old, making it the oldest ever discovered. More unusually, they were found more than 42 miles (68 kilometers) from the nearest coast, extending the known range of these ornaments from the Channel Islands to the California interior.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s cool that this is the oldest of its kind identified so far, but cooler still to view it as part of a broader Early Holocene cultural landscape seemingly well-established in this locale as much as 10,000 years ago,\u201d said Barry A. Price, an archaeologist at Applied EarthWorks Inc. and one of the study\u2019s authors, along with Simone Schinsing and Jasmine Kidwell. The study is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.tandfonline.com\/doi\/full\/10.1080\/1947461X.2026.2659482\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in California Archaeology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Archaeologists have discovered two giant rock scallop beads that push back the clock on the first appearance of these high-status ornaments. The discovery shows that these prized marine beads were traded hundreds of miles from the California coast thousands of years earlier than previously thought. Radiocarbon dating places one of the beads at roughly 8,500 [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":579,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-242448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-futurism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/579"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242448"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242448\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}